


we're safe and sound

by greekdemigod



Series: Canon GJ One-Shots [1]
Category: Gentleman Jack (TV)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-17
Updated: 2019-07-17
Packaged: 2020-06-30 05:02:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19846126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greekdemigod/pseuds/greekdemigod
Summary: Anne Lister has one pressing matter that keeps her from fully engaging in her reunion with Ann Walker: she hasn't bathed in fifteen days. Ann Walker decides to take care of her.





	we're safe and sound

**Author's Note:**

> this is what happens when we get to fangirling in our groupchat. i write sugary sweet fluff at work.  
> thank you for reading!

The world rights itself when Ann slots back into her arms after ten months apart, as if she was created for just this purpose, made in exactly the shape of her arms. With the many-splendored beauty of creation all around them and the sun smiling down upon them, Anne Lister does not doubt for even a second that they were meant to find each other, and in each other a happy ending.

Their mouths keep coiling back together, pushing through the whispered sweet nothings, the _I have missed you_ ’s and the _I love you_ ’s that keep spilling from them. Her tongue will never be able to form anything but affection for Ann ever again, even her sighs will proclaim her love from now on.

But there is one thought—intrusive, cutting through her haze of all things Ann—that makes her slow down, that eventually makes Anne rip herself away.

She has been on a boat for fifteen days. A trip worth risking life and limb for, she can now say, but the reality remains: she hasn’t bathed in so long, and she feels disgusting. The rain that washed over her when she stood leaning over the railing, struggling to keep her gut’s contents inside, doesn’t count. Cleanliness is paramount, and she is currently its polar opposite.

And part of it is, she feels a new woman. A happy one, a shining one. She would very much appreciate to be clean to reflect that.

“I would loathe for us to part, but—” She gets no further than that; Ann clamps her hands around Anne’s upper arms, and the look she casts up at her is that of a startled, scared thing.

“No—why?” Anne has missed the scrunching of Ann’s nose, the furrows it creates between her brows, the way it seems to cast a shadow over the crystalline quality of her eyes. “Let’s not part ever again.”

Arguably, she does like the sound of that. She wants to keep Ann perpetually in her sights too, lest she slip between her fingers once more through a cruel trick of fate, but—well, why not. Ann waiting while she bathes is hardly the strangest thing that has happened in her life yet. “Would you come with me to Shibden, then? For just a few hours?”

“Ever so gladly.” And she seals it with a kiss that Anne can’t deny, no matter the suddenly pressing matter. For a few moments longer, she can stand on this hilltop near the collapse of her fortunes, and kiss the woman she loves.

The trip back into Halifax is a cold affair with the imposed distance between them. Every now and then their knuckles graze together and warmth jolts through her, her lips curl into a smile without her being able to or wanting to stop it, and the day gets a bit brighter again. Even still, it seems to take a small eternity of bated breath and visceral longing that by the time her eyes fall upon shabby little Shibden, it is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen—only second after her soon-to-be wife.

Marian is about to launch herself into a tirade, by the looks of it, but then her eyes fall on Ann and she softens noticeably. “I see you have managed to track down my sister. No small feat.”

Ann smiles. “I have indeed. Thank you so much for telling me she had returned.”

“Of course.”

Anne steps between the two of them, nudging Marian aside with her shoulder, and she hears her sister’s soft, swallowed huff. It brings inexplicable joy to Anne to be able to elicit such annoyance from her relatives. “Where is Eugénie?”

“The other servants have put her to bed. I haven’t the slightest what you have put her through, but you have run her ragged.” Marian follows behind them, deeper into the house.

“Have Cordingley draw me a hot bath then. I am positively _filthy_ and I will stand for it no longer.”

Anne throws her coat and hat aside, uncaring, and turns around to grasp Ann by the hands and pull her along. “I don’t believe I have had the opportunity of showing you around my home yet. Ah, Hemingway, take miss Walker’s things, would you?”

How good it feels to be back with her corps of loyal servants again, instead of having just Eugénie and Thomas, and their endless, uninteresting bickering. “We will be waiting upstairs for that bath.”

She looks at her house with new eyes. It looks better—warmer, more comforting, elegant—when it has Ann Walker inside it. The prospect of moving her in, of waking with her every morning, spending her evening hour with her, has never made her happier than it does now. Her fingers shake against the banister with how her nerves have been set alight.

“What a charming house,” Ann whispers as she slides into Anne’s side, propping her arm up with her shoulders, nestling against her. “Would you show me your room?”

Their hands lace together, giggles get hushed, Anne takes Ann up to her room and wastes no time in pressing her back against the door and sliding their mouths together again in that sweetest of touches. To finally have Ann in her own bedroom sends her head spinning a little—she had been so sure this would happen, then doubts, and words spoken buzzing through her head, such fits of aching she had gone through in this room, but now… Oh, now she has miss Walker here, trembling so sweetly against her, and everything is quite as it’s supposed to be.

“Would you stay here tonight?” Anne whispers into the soft, fragrant dip of Ann’s neck. “Would you stay all night?”

“Yes.” She feels the answer more than hears it. “I would.”

There is a knock only inches from where Ann’s halo of golden hair is pressed to the door; she jumps at it, pushes further into Anne, and she can’t be mad about it.

“Your bath is ready, ma’am.” Oh Cordingley, you fast bastard.

Anne claims one more kiss, two, three, catches herself, four, pushes herself away, one hand pressed by Ann’s head against the door. “Here is where we part then for a bit.”

“ _No_.”

Scotland _has_ done her some good, then. Anne has never seen Ann be this vocal about her displeasure.

“We are to be _married_ ,” she husks beneath her breath, looking up with such damning innocence. “Should I not get to be with my wife even if she is bathing?”

“We are not yet,” Anne adds gently, tracing a thumb along the shell of Ann’s ear. “Soon.”

“No. I will not look upon you without your clothes, then, but I want to be there.” She puts her hands against Anne’s sides and clutches at them. “ _Please_. I have half a mind to think I will just as soon lose you as I take my eyes off you.”

And truly, she could not deny Ann this. There was nothing in her that could give her counter-argument any weight. “Of course. Come on, then.”

Cordingley has wisely left them alone. Anne brings her guest into the small room, of which the filled, steaming bath tub takes the center and most of the available space. She locks the door behind them, to safeguard they are left to themselves. If the great cosmos had ever cared for her, it would let everyone leave them alone for a long, long time to come to make up for the time they had spent apart and aching.

“I will give you your privacy,” Ann says softly, teasingly, turning away to face the wall.

What would she do if Ann _did_ look? By now her love feels as unquantifiably big as her faith. Uncharacteristically, she does not know the answer to her own question.

She sheds fabric quickly, dropping everything unceremoniously to the floor. Anne is aware of Ann’s breath, her gentle shuffling, as a second consciousness outside her own body. But true to her religious nature, she only calls when she is submerged to the shoulders into the scalding, soapy water. “You may look.”

Ann holds her hands over her eyes when she turns around, then, almost childlike, peeks between them. They both blush as they look at one another. All that keeps them from committing a crime in the eyes of God is the foam of soap, yet nothing about this feels even remotely wrong.

They spend quite a nice time like this, Anne soaking in a tub—that she already mentally notes she should have replaced with a bigger model so they can do this together once they’re married—and Ann sitting on the floor beside her, and they talk about Copenhagen and Scotland, about how Anne is going to save her coal pit, about when they should take their communion.

Anne washes herself clean with soap and Ann’s presence, scrubs the longing and the heartbreak from her weary bones, collects ten months' worth of kisses over the rim of her bath.

After a few minutes, she slides in deeper, head dipping beneath the surface so that all she sees is shadow of blue and hears only roaring in her ears.

She shoots back with a gasp when she feels hands going through her hair, gentle but sure fingers threading through the locks and rubbing soap into them. “There is nothing in the Bible that says I can’t wash your hair before you are my wife,” Ann whispers against her bare, wet shoulder, between doting, soft kisses. It feels like it should be illegal, because of how she thrills and trembles with the intimacy of it.

She has never been taken care of like this before.

The ministrations grow bolder, massage her scalp and knead her neck and trace the curves of her shoulders. Anne is a wire pulled taut, her skin tingling where Ann leaves it in her wake.

If they were married already, she could do what she wanted to Ann right now, but for modesty’s sake she stays put, the sweetest torture.

Ann washes her hair clean, wrings it out, and starts combing it against the outside of the tub, repeated motions until every tangle is unknotted and her hair is smooth as silk. She ties it together, too, into a simple braid. Every brush of fingers against her back is a lick of fire through her chest.

Her voice is laced with emotions when she chokes out, “Let me get dressed. Two minutes.” She takes Ann, who is keeping her eyes squeezed shut, back to her room and deposits her on the bed.

A simple pair of pants that hasn't seen the light of day since her last visit to a particular lodging house is dug up, for how quickly she can get them on if nothing else. A blouse hangs loosely off her frame.

Dressed, if not appropriately, at least by all technicalities so. And then, finally, she can topple onto Ann onto the bed.

After they're married, they will be able to do away with everything that separates them—the distance between their houses, the inches of their clothing. But for now, just having Ann back is enough.

And it's everything.


End file.
